Location
1220 Wien
Competition
10/2021 | 2nd Prize, with Special Honors
Site Area
4.750 m²
Gross Built Floor Space
11.385 m²
Density (FAR)
2,95
Net Rentable Floor Space
7.825 m²
Units
112
Partner in Charge
Mark Gilbert
Project Team
Christian Aulinger, Mark Gilbert
Competition: Matthias Brandmaier, Claudia Frediani, Adam Koten
Client
ÖVW
Landscape Architect
rajek barosch Landschaftsarchitektur
Visualisations
©expressiv
In the Fall of 2021, the city of Vienna organized a competition for the planning and construction of innovative social housing. Sited upon a long, thin parcel in the city’s 22nd District, the project brief invited architects to investigate how affordable housing could respond to two crucial challenges in the world around us:
First, the question of ecological construction in an era of climate change – how can renewable, low-carbon materials best be used to build multi-family housing? Second, a social issue – how can social housing accommodate the dislocation of work, from the office into the home?
Our project proposed a highly efficient wood/concrete hybrid technology for its skeletal-frame construction, which significantly reduces the building’s ecological footprint. Wood binds CO2 during growth. And bonding thin layers of concrete with cross-laminated wooden plates optimizes each material’s technological and ecological qualities within the the building system. Prefabricated curtain-wall panels, with recyclable fiber-cement cladding, are used for the building’s skin. The balconies are built out of weather resistant cement-plates mounted on exposed wooden posts of laminated larch.
Arrayed around three stabilizing concrete stairwells, the skeleton of the building-system is flexible and can be subdivided in response to both short and long-term needs.
The competition prescribed an initial usage of affordable social housing. The project arranged a series of apartments of varied size, layout and orientation. Certain units are large, single-loaded and cross-ventilated. Some are smaller, double-loaded flats. Others, two-story maisonettes. But all share two characteristics. Each have generous balconies and dedicated, functional spaces for home-office that fit organically into their compact floor plans.
These Home-Offices are the programmatic premise of the housing. Some workspaces have a large format and are located on their own floor of a maisonette. Others are small yet clearly defined niches which offer work-at-homers privacy, separation and infrastructure within a one-, two-, or three-room apartment. The work spaces are indicated by the colored shading in the floor plans to the left.
The housing is enhanced by a spectrum of community spaces, such as a house cafe, child care, and a room for gymnastics and yoga. These spaces offer home-workers a respite from the tedium of working alone, and chances to exercise, relax and communicate with their neighbors.
The Interplay of the apartment-plans and the building structure creates a lively, highly articulated façade, both to the Hirschstettnerstraße street front as well as to the courtyard-like plaza that the building shares with the newly built public
school to its east.
Hischstettnerstraße Social Housing is affordable housing that uses state-of-the-art, ecologically conscious construction to generate innovative apartment units, whose typology and floor plans thoughtfully respond to the critical needs of contemporary urban living.
